The assignment, completion, and accounting of fueling operations for the aviation industry typically relies on a manually intensive paper-based system. Fueling resources, such as aircraft hydrant vehicles and fueling tanks, are typically affixed with mechanical meters. Utilizing these meters, a fueling agent (i.e., the person responsible for physically delivering fuel to an aircraft) records on a paper receipt the fueling resource's fuel totals before and after fueling an aircraft. Copies of this receipt are then hand carried to the pilot of the aircraft and to fuel accountants who manually calculate the total volume of fuel pumped into the aircraft. Eventually, fuel accountants manually key in the day's fuel information into an accounting database.
This conventional technology leads to numerous problems. The act of manually stamping paper tickets and passing hard copies to a number of different individuals is a time consuming and inefficient process. Further, lost tickets occur frequently in conventional paper-based systems, leading to lost inventory and inefficient record keeping.
Varec's® FuelsManager® Aviation 7.0 describes improvements to the conventional paper-based system described above. Specifically, among other things, the FuelsManager® Aviation 7.0 system supports electronic fuel ticketing, real-time dispatch operations, fuel accounting databases, and airline flight information systems in an integrated manner that eliminates paper-based transactions and accounting. Utilizing the FuelsManager® Aviation 7.0 system, a fueling operations dispatcher (hereinafter “dispatcher”) can monitor aircraft fueling needs and assign fueling operations to available fueling agents. The fueling agents, in turn, can receive these requests from the dispatcher, gather the required fueling resources, and proceed to complete the assigned fueling operations (e.g., fuel the aircraft).
While the Fuelsmanager® Aviation 7.0 system provides significant improvements over conventional fueling transaction technologies, it requires the use of a human dispatcher to manually monitor a dispatch workstation and assign fueling operations as needs arise. Therefore, the efficiency and performance of the systems and methods is limited by the capabilities of the human dispatcher. Accordingly, there exists a need in the art for an advanced system for increasing the efficiency and cost-savings of monitoring and dispatching fueling requests in the aviation industry.